With the recent development of microelectronic technology, a need for structures having a fine conductive pattern formed on the surface of a polymeric resin substrate (or product) such as a variety of resin products or resin layers has increased. The conductive patterns on the surface of the polymeric resin substrate and the structure may be applied to form various objects such as antennas integrated into a mobile phone case, a variety of sensors, MEMS structures, RFID tags, or the like.
As described above, with increasing interest in the technology of forming the conductive pattern on the surface of the polymeric resin substrate, several technologies regarding this have been suggested. However, a method capable of more effectively using these technologies has not been suggested yet.
For example, according to the previously known technology, a method for forming the conductive pattern by forming a metal layer on the surface of the polymeric resin substrate and then applying photolithography, a method for forming the conductive pattern by printing a conductive paste, or the like may be considered. However, when the conductive pattern is formed according to this technology, there are limitations that a required process or equipment becomes too complicated, or it is difficult to form an excellent fine conductive pattern.
Accordingly, there is a need to develop a technology capable of more effectively forming the fine conductive pattern on the surface of the polymeric resin substrate by a simple process.
In order to fulfill the demand in the art, a technology of forming the conductive pattern by using a composition including a specific non-conductive metal compound, and the like blended to a polymeric resin, and performing direct irradiation with electromagnetic waves such as laser, has been suggested. According to this technology, a predetermined region of the composition is directly irradiated with the electromagnetic waves such as laser to selectively expose metal components of the non-conductive metal compound, followed by proceeding with electroless plating and the like on the corresponding region, thereby forming the conductive pattern.
However, when this technology is applied, brittleness is increased by the addition of the non-conductive metal compound, so that basic mechanical physical properties such as impact strength of the polymeric resin substrate (or product) itself are often deteriorated.
Particularly, if the conductive pattern is formed by the direct irradiation with electromagnetic waves, generally the polymeric resin is fabricated into a film or sheet form having a two-dimensional planar structure, and thus, only the physical properties changed in the process for processing into a film or sheet, that is, elongation, shrinkage, or the like were often considered. Therefore, mechanical physical properties such as tensile strength and impact strength were much deteriorated, so that durability required for a product as a tree-dimensional structure was often not satisfied.
Further, when the conductive pattern is formed by the above technology, the conductive pattern has poor adhesion strength with the polymeric resin substrate, such that there is also a problem such as an excellent conductive pattern being difficult to be formed.
Because of this, currently the above-described technology is not widely applied, and there is a continuous demand for improvement of the related technology.